Anthony Eden and the Twilight Of Imperialism – Part 1 of 3
by David Semple
Part One of Britain, Israel and The Sinai-Suez War of 1956
Anthony Eden was the rising young star of British politics during the 1930s. Like his contemporary and successor as Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan, he served as an officer in the First World War and entered politics as a Conservative Member of Parliament after the fall of the Lloyd George government. This period between the two wartime coalitions of 1916-1922 and 1940-1945 was called “the locust years” by Winston Churchill, dominated by the age of the dictators in continental Europe and the slow collapse of the international order in the Pacific as Japan started a series of wars against China. Britain had been allied with Japan from 1902 to 1922 but now had no ally in the Far East. This left her alone as the policeman of the world, exposed to four potential enemies in Germany, Italy, Japan and the Soviet Union. After the fall of France in 1940, it became a clear case of imperial overstretch. During the locust years, Mussolini marched into Abyssinia without opposition and Hitler re-militarized the Rhineland in breach of peace treaties while the Stanley Baldwin government just watched. Then under his successor, Neville Chamberlain, Hitler was allowed to annex Austria and then handed the Czech Sudetenland on a silver platter to the memorable phrase “Peace in our time.” Isolationist America, the strongest economic power in the world, stood aloof from the chaos which engulfed the world, while the United Kingdom remained the overworked controller of the greatest empire in world history. Eden entered the cabinet as Lord Privy Seal and Minister for the League of Nations in 1934. A year later he became Foreign Secretary at the age of thirty eight, an office he held three times over the next twenty years. After his resignation from the Neville Chamberlain government in February 1938, he joined the Conservative backbenchers who dissented to Neville Chamberlain’s foreign policy in dealing with both Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany.
Churchill and Eden were not close allies until Eden joined the wartime coalition in May 1940. Although Eden opposed the Munich agreement in October 1938, he was by no means an active opponent to Chamberlain’s appeasement policy. Whereas Churchill was seen to be in his twilight years during his decade in the political wilderness, when he was the lone voice opposing the rise of Nazi Germany, Eden was an insider whose differences with Chamberlain were more in policy detail rather than in outright opposition to appeasement. Eden’s memoir of this period was entitled “Facing The Dictators” but the reality was more like “Meet The Press.” After returning to the Foreign Office in December 1940, Eden took a secondary role to Churchill in the conduct of British relations with America and the Soviet Union. Eden was an Arabist, while Churchill was a Zionist. Eden was a Continentalist in favor of appeasing Stalin and De Gaulle, while Churchill was an Atlanticist in favor of appeasing Roosevelt. Eden’s diplomatic strategy was built on strong European alliances to preserve the balance of power on the continent, whereas Churchill’s wartime strategy was tied to the bedrock of the Anglo-American alliance. In the end, Russia provided the blood to defeat Nazi Germany, whereas America provided the money and arms that brought victory to the Allies in 1945. During wartime, Churchill showed more foresight than Eden. Churchill had gambled everything on dragging America out of isolation to beat Hitler. His Anglo-American alliance survives to this day, whereas Russia remains the enemy of the free world.
At the end of the war, Europe was left in ruins. The American eagle and the Soviet bear overshadowed the exhausted British lion. Britain still possessed the second largest economy in the world, but the postwar election brought into power the Labour administration of Clement Attlee, a government which chose to build a socialist welfare state at home instead of building on the potential of economic investment in the British Empire. Attlee scuttled India and Palestine very quickly after the war, leaving a disastrous legacy of Islamic terrorism in India and the Middle East which continues to cast a dark shadow over the world of 21st Century. The British Empire became the British Commonwealth. The American-dominated NATO Alliance, with Britain and the nations of Western Europe as junior partners, found itself facing down the Soviet-dominated Warsaw Pact in a Cold War between Anglo-Saxon freedom and Russian communism which lasted for over forty years.
America towered above all other nations as a world superpower, stronger than any other country, including the Soviet Union, which no previous empire in history could match. However, America was a republic, not an empire. The American new world order was going to be built upon the principles of Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points of 1918, but this time America was here to stay as a member of the international community, acting until this day as the policeman of the free world. European colonialism was to be brought to an end and the United Nations in New York City was America’s replacement for the old League of Nations, which failed so miserably during the interwar years. Churchill signed on to the American vision of this new post-colonial order with the Atlantic Charter of August 1941, based upon the principles of self-government, abandonment of the use of force and free trade. Imperial preference was to be abandoned by the British Empire, which would cease to exist anyway, as far as the Americans were concerned.
However, the United Kingdom continued to be a great power after the war, if not quite the equal of the United States. After the initial postwar independence of India, Burma, Pakistan, Ceylon, Jordan and Israel during Attlee years, the Churchill government that was elected in October 1951 continued to play the role of the dominant power in the Middle East. Britain still possessed a massive empire in Africa and the Pacific. Despite the formation of the Council of Europe and Churchill’s speech about the formation of a “United States of Europe”, neither Churchill nor Eden had any intention of joining any continental federation such as the Schuman Plan. Eden favored a united Europe but not British membership of a federation, which was exactly the long-term ambition of the continental nations. The Americans wanted Britain to take the lead in forming a united Europe but Churchill and his Foreign Secretary had other ideas. Anthony Eden did not want Britain to play the role of a second rate power; rather, the first priority of the new government was the unity and consolidation of the Commonwealth, the second the Anglo-American alliance, and the third “a United Europe, to which we are a separate closely-and specially-related ally and friend” in the words of Winston Churchill.
Anxious to revive the Anglo-American unity of the war years, Churchill and Eden headed to Washington early in 1952 to a distinctly cool reception by Harry Truman and Dean Acheson. The Americans were more interested in the Cold War while the British had major problems in the Middle East. A socialist government had nationalized the British Anglo-Iranian Oil Company the year before, about which the Attlee government had done nothing. Eden wanted to take military action against the Iranian regime run by Mohammed Mossadegh, whom he called a “little more than a rug merchant who ought to be brushed aside as he deserved”, whereas the Americans accused the British of behaving like rug merchants themselves and called for Eden to come to terms with Iran. The Americans saw reds under the bed in Iran and feared a communist takeover should Mossadegh be toppled from power, whereas Eden disagreed. Perhaps the DNA of the revolutionary war spirit of 1776 was still causing American resentment at Britain’s attempts to take responsibility for it’s own interests in the Middle East. Truman and Acheson were more sympathetic to nationalism in the Third World than the future of the British Empire.
Egypt posed another problem for the British. The Suez Canal, built by the French and part-owned by Britain, had been a neutral zone under British protection since 1888. The Anglo-Egyptian Treaty of 1936 gave the United Kingdom military control over the canal zone in return for withdrawing her troops from Egypt. The new Wafd government of Egypt repudiated the treaty the same month Churchill returned to Downing Street. Churchill wanted to take a strong line against Egypt, whereas Eden wanted to re-negotiate the treaty. The Americans, however, refused to become involved in the negotiations unless requested to do so by Egypt. Instead, the CIA overthrew King Farouk and replaced him with a military leader, General Nequib. Increasingly, the Americans worried about Britain’s ability to play the role of great power in the Middle East and feared that British weakness would allow the rise of Soviet power in the region, most of which Britain had controlled since conquering it from the Ottoman Empire during the First World War. American policy began to contemplate the prospect of reducing British influence in Iran and Egypt as they had done previously in Greece, Turkey and Saudi Arabia. The following year, the new Republican administration of Dwight Eisenhower overthrew the Mossadegh regime in Iran and allowed the Shah, Mohammed Pahlavi, to rule as an absolute monarch with support from the United States.
In May 1953, the Eisenhower administration decided on a strategy of allaying Arab fears of British imperialism, to replace the British in the Middle East in order to keep the Soviets out, and to do the latter by pressuring Churchill to modify his policies towards the Arab states without directly stepping on British toes. Anthony Eden had different ideas. Whereas the Americans wanted a united Arab alliance under the leadership of Egypt, Eden wanted to form a wider British-dominated regional alliance directed against the Soviet Union, eventually called called the Baghdad Pact, which included Iraq, Turkey, Pakistan and Iran. Israel wanted to join this arrangement but was rejected due to the lack of a comprehensive peace agreement with the Arabs. Britain wanted Jordan to join but King Abdullah refused in the face of domestic opposition. America eventually joined as an observer and negotiated treaty arrangements with each nation individually. Syria refused to join. Egypt was the most important state in the Middle East and also the most awkward for both the Americans and the British. After an attempted assassination of deputy Egyptian prime minister Gamal Abdul Nasser by the Muslim Brotherhood in 1954, General Nequib was put under house arrest and Nasser eventually emerged as the new president. Nasser preferred a policy of neutrality, and did not want to join any Anglo-American defence arrangements. Neutrality soon evolved into pan-Arabism and the Egyptian leader’s ambitions to lead the “Arab nation.” King Farouk, two decades earlier, held similar ambitions to be the leader of the Arab world. Nasser saw the Baghdad Pact as a British imperialist alliance designed to undermine the Arab League and to make the Arabs subservient to both the West and imagined “Zionist” influences.
A Tripartite Declaration between Britain, France and the United States was signed in 1950 to legitimize the sale of arms to the countries of the Middle East. It was designed to maintain a fair balance of arms between Israel and the Arab states. The Arabs and the Israelis were not consulted by the great powers, however, so Arabs were sold arms by the British but the Americans refused to sell arms to Israel. Relations between Israel and the Arab states were hostile. Following the war of independence and their successful defeat of the Arab invasion forces in 1948, Israel concluded armistice treaties with Iraq and Jordan. However, the armistice with Egypt was seen by the Israelis as having ended the state of belligerency, whereas Egypt did not nullify the state of war. In effect, it became a phoney war, with Egypt refusing to recognize Israel, and actively stopping ships bound for the Jewish State in the Suez Canal, in addition to closing it off to all Israeli ships.
There were also tensions along the border between Jordan and Israel. Britain was bound by treaty to defend the Hashemite kingdom in the event of a state of war. The Arab nations made their opinions of Israel quite clear, for instance on Radio Baghdad: “We shall never stop planning for the day of vengeance, for the second round in which the Jews will be driven from our land.” The land referred to was Israel itself, as Arabs would never accept the presence of a Jewish State, or a Christian state should it come into being, on what they deemed to be Muslim lands. This state of permanent hostilities was made quite clear by the Egyptians: “The Palestine war has not ended! The Egyptian blood which has warmed the land of Palestine is a marker, and we must march in the direction to which it points so that we may gain the victory to which our holy saints desired.” War against Israel was thus part of a jihad against all non-Muslims, following the literal instructions of Mohammed in the Koran. It wasn’t just a question of Arab nationalism or self-determination, it was the inability of the Arabs to reject concept of jihad, or holy war by the House of Islam against all other non-Muslims, who were deemed to be in the House of War. As long as Muslims were unable to allow other religious faiths equality in the Middle East, the Arab world was unable to have normal relations with Israel. To this day, this Muslim disorder of the mind has held back the nations of the Middle East, with the Arabs living in a religious fundamentalist time warp straight out of the middle ages, indulging in superstitions long abandoned by the Western world, where church and state are separated.
After having concluded that peace with Israel would be impossible, Nasser began to prepare for the prospect of resuming the war of 1948. Not that military hostilities had ever stopped. Egypt supported Palestinian fedayeen raids from the Egyptian-held Gaza strip, raids which went deep inside Israel’s borders. Some of the raids reached Tel Aviv and the Israelis retaliated by attacking Gaza. Nasser then put further restrictions on Israeli ships in the Suez Canal and restricted Israeli airspace over the Gulf of Aqaba. By this time, Egypt and Britain had negotiated and signed a full treaty which allowed for a twenty month period of evacuation of all British troops from the Suez Canal base, with Britain holding the right to return to Suez for a further seven years. The Suez Canal company would remain under British-French ownership until it reverted to Egyptian ownership in 1968. Britain’s joint headquarters for the Middle East was moved from Suez to Cyprus. Israel felt vulnerable under this arrangement as there would no longer be a Tripartite Army close enough to stop any Egyptian attacks on Israel.
Then on September 27th 1955, an announcement by Nasser came over Egyptian radio: “We have accomplished one of the revolution’s great aims, namely, the creation of a strong national army.” Egypt concluded an arms deal with communist Czechoslovakia that would change the balance of power in the region and threatened Israel in particular. Abba Eban, the Israeli Ambassador to the United States, recommended “that Israel opt for a plan to overthrow Nasser.” Britain was unable to offer any support. “Israel must be made to understand that the West cannot afford to estrange the Moslems,” was the advice to Foreign Secretary Harold Macmillan from his permanent secretary, “Otherwise the Arab states will fall entirely and come under Russian domination and it will be impossible for the West effectively to protect Israel.”
By the time Winston Churchill retired as Prime Minister, Anglo-American relations were still fraught with differences. After the death of Stalin, Churchill wanted to make peace moves towards the Soviet Union but Eisenhower remained sceptical. Eden also argued that little had changed in Russia since the Stalin era. Churchill remained devoted to the Anglo-American alliance until the end, yet he feared that the Americans might lose patience with the Soviets and resort to a showdown against what Eisenhower referred to as the “evil and savage individuals in the Kremlin.” Eden was very critical of America’s failure to sign the Geneva Conference accords which brought the French war in Indo-China to an end. Churchill refused to compromise with Egypt on Suez, whereas Eden preferred negotiations with Nasser. The Americans favored appeasing the Egyptians and put pressure on Churchill to negotiate a deal on the Suez Canal base. Eisenhower suddenly became obsessed with an initiative to mediate a peace deal between the Arab states and Israel. Britain supported it to gain American support for an expansion of the Baghdad Pact. America, however, remained suspicious of this alliance as it sustained British influence in the Middle East, which Eisenhower saw as ultimately driving the Arabs towards the Russians. To Eden, the Baghdad Pact was necessary to sustain British interests in the region as compensation for withdrawal from Suez. To the Americans, British plans risked the destruction of Western interests. The Arab-Israeli peace initiative ultimately failed when Nasser rejected it, as he preferred to wait until things had calmed down in the Arab world. David Ben Gurion, who returned to the office of Israeli Prime Minister, knew all along that peace was unacceptable to the Arabs.
As Anthony Eden entered Downing Street in April 1955, the world was still a dangerous place. Some progress had been made with the formation of the Pacific SEATO defence treaty, the Austrian peace treaty and further peace deals in Korea and Indo-China. But the Cold War was as tense as ever and the Middle East remained explosive. Eden had visited Nasser in Cairo two months earlier, where the Egyptian proceeded to rail against the Baghdad Pact. At a reception for Nasser at the former British Embassy from the colonial era, Eden spoke perfect classical Arabic, boring Nasser with Arab proverbs. Nasser saw the difference between the two worlds: “What elegance! It was made to look as if we were beggars and they were princes!” Although Nasser felt that he might be able to do business with Eden, the two men took an instant dislike to each other. In particular, Eden refused to accept Nasser as the spokesman for the entire Arab world.
Churchill possessed a better understanding of the realities of power than Eden, including the limitations of post war Britain power and the importance of the American alliance. Without America, Britain would not have defeated Nazi Germany. Eden resented American efforts to interfere with British initiatives. John Foster Dulles, the American Secretary of State, wanted the United Kingdom to be a regional power and felt that Eden was a throwback to the age of colonialism. Eden now found himself the Prime Minister of a nation in decline, its world hegemony having been supplanted by America since the end of the Second World War. Anthony Eden’s policy was to resist imperial decline. He disliked Dulles, a Wilsonian internationalist who distrusted the colonial powers. Eden still wanted Britain to be a global power, which in fact she was, and could continue to be only so long as the British treasury could afford the costs. What now compromised the ability of Great Britain to act on the stage as a world power was the legacy of Clement Attlee. Britain had become an expensive welfare state with nationalized industries and expensive bureaucratic overheads. It was going to be very hard for a welfare state to be a warfare state.
Eden entered Number 10 Downing Street almost fourteen years after first being notified by Churchill that he was to be heir apparent on November 11th 1941: “Dined with Winston, Brendan only other present. W talked of future and suddenly said that if anything happened to him I should have to take over.” In his memoirs, Eden referred to this as the beginning of his long era as crown prince. On his retirement, Churchill spoke to his private secretary about the prospects for his successor: “I don’t believe Anthony can do it.” Churchill had kept Eden waiting to the bitter end, often promising to retire and then putting it off for one reason or another. In fact, he wanted to die in office, like his former boss Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman. But he couldn’t continue to put retirement off forever. In his final days in the Foreign Office, Churchill asked Eden how he had got on with Harold Macmillan at a meeting in Paris. “Very well, why?’ Churchill replied “Oh, he is very ambitious.”
David Semple is a filmmaker and writer from Canada. He is currently writing a book called Jerusalem in the Age of Imperialism and is writing a film script about Field Marshal Allenby’s Palestine campaign.
[The opinions, facts and any media content are presented solely by the author and do not necessarily represent the views of the Jewish Media Agency.]
